Scott hadn’t seen me; he was wearing a blindfold. He hadn’t heard me either, though I’d made quite a bit of noise getting the swollen old door open, because there was an MP3 player clipped to a bracket too, the earplugs pumping out what sounded to me like a tinny wasp buzz of music. Old school metal, I’d have guessed; it was what he liked to drive to when he got use of Alex’s car, or mine. It was what he’d been listening to when he totalled his own, the idiot. But he must have felt the draught from the door, because he said ‘Stacy?’ in that loud voice people use when they can’t hear themselves properly. ‘We’d better hurry up; Av will be here soon.’
My second thought wasn’t really a thought at first, just a wave of relief that it was all over. No more insane drives on a weekend down some of the most choked motorways in Britain trying to snatch a few hours with a boyfriend on the other side of the bloody country. No more waiting in Penrith station for his train. No more half-assed explanations on the phone that he’d been forced to stay on too late at the office and that he wouldn’t be with me until tomorrow morning – make that lunchtime, probably. It was over. At least I’d be able to use my vibrator and fantasise about other men with a clear conscience from now on.
‘Stace? Come on.’
I walked down towards him, fists bunched, wondering what exactly I was going to do now. He looked very vulnerable, spreadeagled like that. And just a little bit silly. The black hair beneath his arms stuck out in wild tufts. His nipples were hard from the chill of the concrete garage and I could see the gooseflesh around them. His cock stuck straight out like a short peg, stiff but not distended. His balls were bunched up high. I put out my hand and stroked that fat pouch, stirring the hairs. He did have really hairy balls, did Scott, even though years of wearing a neoprene suit had rubbed the hair off his arse and legs where you’d expect to find it.
He reacted to my touch, squirming in his bonds and making appreciative noises. The headphones pulsed: zing, zing, zing. I tickled his fancy a moment longer then passed under his arm to take at look at him from behind. Lines of dark hair marched up the unguarded nape of his neck. His back was narrow and strong, his hips lithe. Those familiar buttocks, muscular yet bald as a baby’s, sported a red mark like the imprint of a bar across their fullest swell. I didn’t understand what it was until I looked down. Arrayed on the beach blanket on which he stood – and he was still wearing his socks, I noted, with a contemptuous wrinkle of my nose – was a ruler, a table-tennis bat and a bright-yellow kitchen glove.
I couldn’t really be sure what the rubber glove was intended for – Flicking him? Wanking him off? Sticking a finger up his butt? – but the other two seemed pretty obvious. I picked up the ruler, twelve inches of transparent plastic of the sort we used to use in school, and laid it across the welt to see if it fitted. Which it did perfectly. Scott felt the chill.
‘Stace!’
I bent the plastic back with my other hand and let him have it, stingingly. He jumped and quivered and gasped, ‘Ah! Yes! Go on!’
He was a gobby bugger for someone who was tied up so submissively, I decided. I’d had no idea that he got his jollies doing this. He’d never once asked me to spank him. I checked his cock and saw that it had grown in response to the stimulation to become a proper erection. It needed teaching a lesson, just as Scott did. Moving back round before him, I slapped his cock sideways with the ruler. Then I slapped it back. Its moist eye winked as his foreskin eased back from the swelling glans. Scott rolled his own head from side, exposing his throat.
A good job for him I wasn’t really vindictive, I thought viciously as I slapped his cock back and forth, my smacks getting harder. His tool lurched and lolled like a tree in a storm and he gasped and bit his lip and bared his teeth, strung between the pleasure and the pain. I struck at the tops of his thighs too, as I gained in confidence and ire, and that made his pinioned legs thrash. I laid a couple of strokes across his lower belly, just over his bladder, ignoring his protests. In fact the only target I avoided was his full scrotum; I wanted to punish him, not castrate him. When his cock was bright red I stopped and inserted the ruler between his thighs though, beating up with measured, warning taps on his spunk-bag, letting him know what I could do, if I wanted to. He spread his knees as much as he could and groaned, sweat running down the inside of his thighs, his prick dancing.
I got irritated with that. He was enjoying it too much. Abandoning the torture without warning I crossed back behind him to pick up the ping-pong bat. The rubber had been removed from one face revealing the plywood, and holes had been drilled through the paddle. Well, experimentation was the only way to find out the effects of this one, so I brought it across in a resounding smack on his arse. I was delighted to find that the unclenched male bottom is just as capable of a delightful wobble as the female one.
I spent some time appreciating the subtle difference in sound and vibration I got from the two different faces of the paddle and, by that time, Scott’s bum was flushed red all over. I could hit his buttocks a whole lot harder than I could his prick, too, which gave me great satisfaction. Scott, I could tell, was trying not to sound too wimpy, but his grunts were coming out as half yelps. My own breathing was coming hard from the exertion.
But my other hand was feeling left out. I decided the only way forwards was to stand at Scott’s side, right under his straining arm, and, with the familiar perfume of his deodorant and his sweat in my nostrils, to punish him fore and aft at the same time: one jouncing blow on his pert buns with the bat, followed by a lighter stinging slap on the shaft of his cock. Over and over, until he was red in the face and gasping and crying out, ‘Stace! Suck it! Suck it please!’
I wasn’t going to stoop to that. I gave him three really hard smacks on the behind, enough to make my own arm ache, then turning the ruler I scraped its narrow edge up his prick from root to bulging helmet. It was like squeezing a bag of icing. His spunk shot out in a long sticky line at the first spasm, falling through the air to bespatter the concrete floor. A second gobbet followed. The weaker aftershocks just splashed and oozed down his cock. Scott pitched forwards in his bonds, babbling like an idiot.
At that moment the door opened and Stacy walked in, saying, ‘Scott, Avril’s car’s out the front –’
She stopped when she saw me and went red to the ears. Stupid cow. She didn’t even remember that he couldn’t hear her. I stepped back, raised the bat one last time and let him have it on the arse with everything I had left in arm and shoulder and chest. I nearly lifted him off the floor. Scott wasn’t expecting an epilogue and certainly nothing that hard; this time he let loose a scream of pain. Flicking out one earplug I told him, ‘You’re dumped, dipshit!’ and marched out past a cowering Stacy.
I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since.
I came out of my reverie, surprised at myself and more surprised by the effect it’d had on me; I was tingling and a bit flushed. This wasn’t great timing for the female equivalent of a rogue erection I told myself and, for a moment, I was tempted to stick my hand down my waistband and work it all off. There wasn’t anyone to see, I reasoned, and I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I released some of the pressure. Then I finally spotted my first real landmark – an outcrop of particularly large boulders off to my left – and I pushed thoughts of sex firmly away as I turned to it.
The trees seemed to be thinner there, the bracken higher. I hoped in vain for a path, but none came into view and eventually I just breasted the ferns. The damp from the leaves started to soak into my clothes and the smell of the bruised stems was curiously unpleasant. Just before I reached the rocks I broke out into clear ground – a wide patch of trampled bracken. The smell here was worse. A cloud of flies rose buzzing. There was something lying on the crushed leaves, something red and black, thin like stripped branches and twisted like driftwood. I stared at it for a long moment before I realised what I was looking at.
It was the remains of a deer. A big one, with a burgeoning rack of antlers. There wasn�
�t much left of it but bone.
I made a face. Then movement caught my eye and I looked up at the rocks, straight at a huge dog that had appeared on one of the boulders. As I hesitated another jumped up next to it; both were watching me with ears pricked. They were dark grey with amber eyes. The muzzle of the first wrinkled into a snarl. My head told me I must be looking at a couple of German shepherds, and I’m not normally at all nervous of dogs. Ancient instinct from somewhere deep inside me had a very different theory: I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
‘No,’ I said, starting to back off, trying to keep calm. The big canine gathered itself to jump. Instinct won: I turned and fled, crashing through the bracken. I had a good head start and I’d turned downhill, but there was no way I was going to win that race. Within seconds I heard it rustling through the leaves behind me. I redoubled my efforts, completely reckless now, my feet catching on the bracken stems and nearly tripping me flat. I had a vague idea of climbing a tree, and I fled towards the only one that promised spreading branches I could catch hold of and jumped for the lowest branch. My fingertips grazed painfully across its underside. I landed heavily, realised that I wasn’t going to have a second chance because the animal was crashing through the ferns nearly at my heels, and just managed to put my back to the trunk, throwing my arms up to shield my throat and face. I caught a glimpse of the beast, jaws gaping, in mid-leap, and I shut my eyes.
It hit me full on, sharp teeth and claws raking my skin. But there was no real weight behind the attack. It exploded around me and when it had passed I was still standing, my back crushed to the bark of the oak, gasping in the sudden silence. I looked down and saw piled up against me a great shapeless mass of dead holly. Some of the dried leaves were still falling away, snapped by the force of its impact. I pushed it off and the clump collapsed onto its side amidst the bracken.
There was no sign of any animal.
I ran my hands down my forearms, feeling the sting of many tiny cuts from the spiny leaves. My fingers came away bloody. I put my hands on my knees, clawing back control over my ragged breath, still staring. By the time I’d straightened up I was starting to shake. I walked right round the tree looking in vain for any further sign of threat, then set out, blindly.
I think I’d lost my bearings a while back, but at least there’d been a chance of retracing my path. Now I was really lost. It doesn’t take much to do that in a wood, where the horizon is hidden and the land folds in unforeseen directions. Little hillocks that wouldn’t even show up on a map become huge obstacles, and tiny valleys promise to lead places but peter out to dead ends. I stumbled around aimlessly, switching between rabbit tracks. As the shock of my flight wore off it gave room to shame and confusion and finally an unfocused anger. I had no clue what had just happened to me and that made me want to lash out even more. I felt just as I had done standing on the fountain, hearing the laughter and realising for the first time that it was all a joke at my expense, and that everyone but me was in on it.
When I finally stumbled onto a track – a proper earthen track, wide enough to drive a Land Rover down and carpeted in pale grass – I was none the wiser about where I was, but I did feel some relief. It didn’t stop me snapping at the first person that I saw coming round a bend in the path, ‘Excuse me, this is private property, you know.’
He stopped dead, taken aback. His hands were thrust into the pockets of an army-surplus jacket. Everything about him was army surplus down to the boots on his feet, and all of it looked worn out and hung baggily. ‘This is a public bridle path,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got a right of way.’
I took a better look at him and noted he didn’t look the squaddie type at all. He was a redhead, and red hair is so criminally unfashionable on men that there are only two options: shave the lot short and let your scalp shine through, or go the other way and flaunt it defiantly. This guy had chosen the latter course, sporting long dreadlocks tied back loosely. There were two gold rings through his right eyebrow. More student than soldier, I told myself.
‘There’s no bridle path through Grange Wood,’ I insisted, already regretting being so rude.
‘Oh there is,’ he said, not rising at all to the aggressive tone of my opening gambit. I’d realised he was somewhat older than his style of dress indicated: not a student but a real neo-hippie. His stubble glinted red gold where the sunlight caught his cheek. ‘Look on your county map; this is an ancient greenway. It’s been used since at least the Middle Ages by local people, and was said at one time to stretch all the way to Dartmoor. Supposedly the fay ride from Yes Tor down this path on moonlit nights.’
In the face of this excess of information I just repeated dumbly, ‘Fay?’
‘I’d avoid them if I were you. They like young –’ He tilted his head, glanced sharply from my helmet to my leggings, and suddenly his expression, which had been quite relaxed, grew much colder. ‘Hey, you’re not one of Deverick’s stooges, are you?’
This wasn’t how I wanted to hear myself described. ‘I work for Michael Deverick, yes,’ I said stiffly.
He swore under his breath and looked about him sharply. ‘He’s not in the wood, is he? No, I’d have heard if he was.’
‘No, he’s not.’ Christ, he was a bit too intense.
‘He’s got more sense, I’d assume. He sent you in though. Got someone to do his dirty work for him, as usual.’
‘I’m just starting a survey.’ Now that he was the one being unfriendly, I was quite uncomfortable. ‘I’m not doing anyone’s “dirty work”. Have you got a problem with him?’
Swampy – or whatever his name was – pulled a face and pointedly ignored my question. ‘And did he tell you what he was looking for?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Did he tell you how dangerous it was?’
We glared at each other. A blackbird rustled around noisily in the undergrowth. ‘There’s … you should be careful,’ I admitted awkwardly. ‘There’re dogs or something loose in the wood.’
‘Or something,’ he agreed.
I refused to use the word lurking at the tip of my tongue. ‘You’ve seen them?’ I demanded. My head was whirling. I couldn’t even make up my mind if I had imagined those … animals, whatever they were.
‘There are lots of things in the woods. Some of them are there to keep people like Deverick – and you – out.’ There was no mistaking the hostility now.
‘You put the Christmas decorations up, did you? Are you trying to scare people off?’
He squinted, half-contemptuous, half-irritated.
‘What have got in there? Your squat? Your caravan? This isn’t your land, you know.’
He laughed out loud, but it didn’t sound like he thought it funny. ‘You think it’s Deverick’s? People like you make me sick.’
‘I’m damn sure it’s Mr Deverick’s land. And all I’m doing is my job.’
‘I can see that. Kill trees, do you, to make more room for little boxy houses and executive golf courses? Congratulations. You should be proud.’
That was so unfair. Nine times out of ten I was on the side of people like him – ignorant, impractical, self-righteous pricks as they were. ‘It’s not exactly that simple, is it?’
‘You work for Deverick. Sounds simple enough to me.’
‘You have no idea what he’s planning,’ I protested. ‘He’s very positive about enviro–’
‘I have no idea?’ He’d gone really pale; it was a strange reaction. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding? I know exactly what he’s up to! And you can tell him from me that he’s not getting his hands on these woods. So go on, you can piss off now.’
Well, that certainly brought the conversation to an end. He folded his arms, waiting for my next move. I gritted my teeth, looked around me, and finally admitted, ‘I don’t know which way’s out.’
He didn’t laugh at me. Good God, a man who didn’t laugh. He just nodded, very slightly. He had hazel eyes, I noticed, fractured green and brown. ‘The track
behind you will get you to the bank at the wood boundary. Don’t worry, the bridle path is safe, even for you. Go through the gap in the hedge, down the farm track and you’ll be on the road to the village.’
I blinked. ‘You’re sure? That doesn’t sound like the right direction at all.’
‘You got yourself turned round. It happens here a lot. It’s the witch balls.’
‘The what?’
He sighed. ‘The glass balls.’
I shook my head. ‘What do they do?’
‘They deflect witches,’ he said, as if it were obvious. ‘And similar sorts.’
‘Hey,’ I said, trying to make light. ‘My sister reads the tarot, but I’m not a witch.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not.’ And reaching out, he plucked something from my jacket pocket before I realised he was touching me. I saw the object in his hands: a hooded purple flower. Then he dropped it to the floor and crushed it underfoot.
The monkshood. And then I remembered its other common name: wolfsbane. I nodded dizzily and turned away, confused into acquiescence. Only after I’d started walking down the track did I think to ask my eco-freak acquaintance about the flower’s significance. I span round, but he had already gone, vanished from the public right of way into the forbidden depths of the wood.
3: Ill Met by Moonlight
THAT NIGHT THERE was a full moon. I switched off the TV, grabbed my climbing harness and headed out across the rough grassland behind my cottage.
I love the night, out in the country. Taking away my vision seems to bring all my other senses to life – my skin prickles, my ears pick up the faintest sounds, even my sense of smell seems more acute. Stick me in an urban alley after midnight and I’m as jumpy as the next woman, but not out here where the furtive noises that can sound so ominous to city-dwellers are familiar to me: the scream of a fox, the clatter of a pigeon in the treetops as it settles itself, the creak of branches. There’s no harm in the English night, so long as you’re away from other human beings.
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